NAME: ________________________________________________________
INTA 295 –Exercise #4
(DUE Thursday 2/12/09 at class time)
[1] Launch the Adobe Acrobat Reader & then click to open a file. In the dialog box, open the Cross-National Datasets
folder on the L drive (L:\LS\Common\Faculty\POSC\Cross-National Datasets). Open the Political-Economic Indicators
folder and then open subfolder #33 (the Global05 dataset). Now open the PDF codebook file (Global05_Codebook.pdf).
Find 2 ordinal or interval/ratio measures of democracy that you believe have face validity. The nominal definition of
democracy for this exercise is: a political system in which several major government officials are chosen via free & fair
elections and there is respect for basic civil liberties including freedom of speech, assembly, organization, and religion. In
the space provided below, list the name & number of each variable and record each variable’s full description.
[a] # ____ NAME ___________________
Description:
[b] # ____ NAME ___________________
Description:
[c] Which of the two measures above has greater content validity as a measure of how democratized a country is and
why? Now, justify this choice: discuss the strengths & weaknesses of each measure in making your case.
[2] Stay in the GLOBAL05 codebook. Find 2 ordinal or interval/ratio measures of violent crime that you believe have
face validity. The nominal definition of violent crime for this study is: crimes that involve physical violence against
people including assault, robbery, rape, and murder. In the space provided below, list the name & number of each
variable and record each variable’s full description.
[a] # ____ NAME ___________________
Description:
[b] # ____ NAME ___________________
Description:
[c] Which of the two measures above has greater content validity as a measure of violent crime in a country? Now,
justify this choice: discuss the strengths & weaknesses of each measure in making your case.
[3] Stay in the GLOBAL05 codebook. Examine the variable description for variable 325] MIL %GDP [Total military
expenditure as a percentage of GDP].
a] Convert this interval/ratio measure of military expenditure into an ordinal level measure of military expenditure with 5
categories. Provide the 5 categories below along with the I/R ranges that frame each ordinal category.
b] Convert this interval/ratio measure of health expenditure into a nominal level measure of military expenditure with 2
categories. Provide 2 categories below along with the I/R ranges that frame each nominal category: one for countries
with high military expenditures and one for all other countries.
c] Now justify the face validity of the range of values on the MIL %GDP variable that you used in [3b] above to
characterize countries as having high military expenditures.